How to Add a User and Grant Root Privileges on Ubuntu 16.04

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS provides you the ability to add a user for anyone who plans on accessing your server. Creating a user is a basic setup but an important and critical one for your server security. In this tutorial, we will create a user and grant administrative access, known as root, to your trusted user.

Pre-Flight Check

Open a terminal and log in as root.

Work on a Linux Ubuntu 16.04 server

Creating a User with Root Privileges

Step 1: Add The User

Create a username for your new user, in my example my new user is Tom:

adduser tom

You’ll then be prompted to enter a password for this user. We recommend using a strong password because malicious bots are programmed to guess simple passwords. If you need a secure password, this third party password generator can assist with creating one.

Usernames should be lowercase and avoid special characters. If you receive the error below, alter the username. ~# adduser Tom adduser: Please enter a username matching the regular expression configured via the NAME_REGEX[_SYSTEM] configuration variable. Use the `--force-badname' option to relax this check or reconfigure NAME_REGEX.

Prompts will appear to enter in information on your new user. Entering this information is not required and can be skipped by pressing enter in each field.

Enter the new value or press ENTER for the default Full Name []: Room Number []: Work Phone []: Home Phone []: Other []:

Lastly, the system will ask you to review the information for accuracy. Enter Y to continue to our next step.

Is the information correct? [Y/n]

Step 2: Grant Root Privileges

Assigning a user root access is to grant a user the highest power. My user, tom, can then make changes to the system as a whole, so it’s critical to allow this access only to users who need it. Afterward, this user will be able to use sudo before commands that are usually designed to be used by the root user.

usermod -aG sudo tom

Step 3: Verify New User

As root, you can switch to your new user with the su – command and then test to see if your new user has root privileges.

su - tom

If the user has properly been granted root access the command below will show tom in the list.

grep '^sudo' /etc/group

Output:

sudo:x:27:tom

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Author Bio

About the Author: Echo Diaz

Throughout Echo's four year stint as a technical support specialist, her passion for breaking down complex concepts has to lead to a career in professional writing. As a top tier support specialist, she adds a distinctive element to her written work that speaks to customer feedback and concerns.

Echo occasionally pops her head out from behind her computer to watch her dog energetically run around the yard and unabashedly shovels money into buying tickets to see her favorite musical artists.